THE TORTURED

Craig (Jesse Metcalfe) runs around frantically on a busy freeway bridge, ringing the police and reporting his son Benjamin (Jakob Davies) as having been kidnapped.

By the time he returns to the family home, it's swarming with police. When his wife Elise (Erika Christensen) arrives, she is understandably distraught to hear the news: Benjamin was snatched from their front lawn as he played while Craig was in the house searching for sun cream to smother the lad in.

The couple are devastated and feel helpless as the police promise to find the boy, but outwardly seem to be doing very little other than fretting over the fact that kidnappers this brazen are rarely looking for a ransom: they are, rather, psychos.

Indeed, a few miles away in a much quieter neighbourhood, we discover that lunatic loner Kozlowski (Bill Moseley) is keeping Benjamin tied to a bed in his cellar. In the film's creepiest scenes, Kozlowski dons women's make-up and takes on the role of an angry stepmother to the boy.

A short while later, two cops visit Kozlowski's home upon receiving reports of a child's crying being heard from within his cellar. But they're just a few minutes too late ...

The upshot of this somewhat shocking, brisk opening is that Benjamin has been murdered by serial child killer Kozlowski. Upper-Middle class couple Craig and Elise are broken, but manage to steel themselves to attend the butcher's trial. Unfortunately, the jury bestow upon him the relatively lenient sentence of 25-years-to-life - meaning he could be released in as little as 10 years.

Craig and Elise don't believe this to be justice and, after a spell of blaming each other for Benjamin's grim demise, resolve to work together and abduct Kozlowski on his journey to prison.

The plan is to take him to a remote, empty house that Elise is aware of through her job as an estate agent. There, they will torture him for his sins. Conveniently, Craig is a doctor - so he knows all the right drugs and pressure points to ensure Kozlowski will feel maximum pain while never losing consciousness or dying ...

A doctor whose child is killed, who then abducts the killer and takes them somewhere remote to torture them? Fucking hell, this is - on paper, at least - alarmingly similar to the recent 7 DAYS. And what's more, both films are of Canadian origin.

Whereas 7 DAYS is based on a best-selling novel and plays out as a surprisingly austere, French-language meditation on revenge at its most fundamental, THE TORTURED is the English language comic-strip variant.

Metcalfe is good-looking and unconvincing throughout, conveying distress by growing a couple of days' worth of stubble and putting across anger with a furrowed brow. Christensen is strangely sedate for a woman who's just lost her son. When the pair of them finally begin to exact revenge on their child's aggressor, they're so enlightened by this that they have hot sex. How unlikely is this scenario?!

THE TORTURED is, then, a rather silly excursion into glossy torture-porn territory (from the producers of SAW), playing openly at manipulating the audience through flashbacks to little Benjamin at his cutest.

Moseley is the obligatory bad guy, the same as he is in seemingly every film he's made since THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. Alas, his casting makes a mockery of the supposed twist ending: the conceit will become apparent to any familiar viewer within the film's first 20 minutes.

The film is very gory in parts, more so than 7 DAYS, and the FX work of Joel Echallier and Rachel Griffin (both veterans of American TV and Uwe Boll films) is excellent. But everything is so overboiled - the performances, the dialogue, Rob Lieberman's direction - that the end result is more amusing than horrifying.

Slick, bloody and short at only 78 minutes in length, THE TORTURED is always watchable. But only in the respect that bad American television can also at times be.

E1 Entertainment's disc presents THE TORTURED uncensored in a crisp, blemish-free anamorphic 1.78:1 transfer. Colours are natural, blacks hold up supremely well and every laceration is detailed in pin-sharp clarity.

English audio is just as impressive in an effectively channelled, sufficiently bassy 5.1 mix. There is also a slightly flatter but still good 2.0 audio option. Removable English subtitles are also provided.

The animated main menu page leads to a static scene-selection menu allowing access to the film via 12 chapters.

Extras are limited. These begin with a group of cast and crewmembers answering the predictable question: what would they do if they were in the protagonists' shoes? This redundant 90-odd second featurette is filmed on location in black-and-white, and is particularly absurd as half of the people quizzed just say "uh, I don't know ...".

Marginally better is a 10-minute Making Of featurette. Lieberman tells us from the film's shoot that he's making a serious film - "not just a genre film". Yeah, right. The shoot seems quite tense at times, with the director speaking rather tersely to his cast. It's interesting but brief.

THE TORTURED is confused in tone and lacking in substance. But it's very nasty in parts and presents a potentially interesting talking point in its premise. But, unless you're in it purely for the gore, 7 DAYS is better.

Also available on blu-ray.

Review by Stu Willis